Informal and Social Learning Through Curation

I’ve written before about the concept of curation. I define it as the ability to sift through the vast amounts of information available to us and find exactly what we’re looking for at the right moment. There’s so much available to us on the internet, it can be a challenge to find good sources of information. And in our busy lives, we don’t have unlimited time to find relevant information.

As business people, we have to learn how to curate. I like to think it’s similar to being a museum art curator. Our skill is putting together works of art from multiple sources in various mediums to convey a story. Now translate that to the corporate world. As business curators, our role is to find data and information from global sources that will help us achieve our goals.

What are those goals? A critical one is learning. We’re not talking formal training programs. Think everyday learning. The vast majority takes place either informally or socially. In order for us to effectively learn in this data overloaded society, we must be able to curate information.

We should view curation not only from the standpoint of where can we go to find good information (i.e. who are good curators for us) but also in terms of the information we need to gather ourselves. Possibly something unique we can’t find anywhere so we’ll curate it ourselves. Or something that can be found in other places but we want to put our own point of view on it.

Curation is different from aggregation. If a good museum curator uses art to tell us a story, a museum aggregator hangs a grouping of pictures and leaves us to figure it out on our own. Sometimes that’s a good thing. We want or need to figure it out on our own. But there are times when aggregation is nothing more than noise. This is why we need to understand curation. Otherwise, we won’t be able to realize the benefit.

At ASTD’s TechKnowledge Conference, I attended a session lead by Fujitsu Laboratories on curation learning. They shared how content curation was being used for organizational learning and their 3-step approach for learning curation:

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Hi! I'm Sharlyn Lauby, an HR pro turned consultant. I created the HR Bartender blog so people would have a friendly place to discuss workplace issues. And since, over the years, I've developed an appreciation for the culinary arts (translation: I'm a foodie) you'll see some of that here, too. So pull up a stool and order your favorite drink... the bar is always open.